SUSE Documentation redefined — Meet the new doc portal

by Jana Jaeger and Meike Chabowski 

We have great news for you: today the new SUSE documentation portal officially launched into the entire SUSE universe.

This important milestone represents a step change for you as it provides a huge improvement in the way you interact with technical documentation across the SUSE portfolio. 

Catering to changing documentation needs

Our good old documentation Web site served everyone well over the years. But with the evolution of search engines and other advancements, your expectations have shifted drastically. Yes, at SUSE, we understand that you have very specific needs, very specific questions and very little time. We know that our product and solution documentation, contributed by the different business units, was scattered across multiple locations. This has made your documentation experience at SUSE anything but consistent lately. 

And yes, at SUSE, we also understand that documentation is an essential part of your software solution. Missing or poor documentation can impact your daily work and ultimately your business’ success. Thus, since 2019, we have been conducting annual documentation surveys in order to improve our services. We asked you to share your feedback — and we listened carefully and acted upon your requirements. The biggest issues you consistently raised were the desire for a one-stop shop for all documentation, better usability, and improved document findability and navigation. 

One-stop shop for SUSE Documentation

Then, putting ourselves in your shoes, we reinvented the SUSE documentation experience from the ground up. As mentioned, before we even started coding, we did extensive research on your documentation needs and your expectations regarding usability and design. The new documentation portal is the answer to your requests. It provides a single and unified access point for all product manuals and guides, articles, best practices and technical reference documents.

You will not, however, find lifecycle information and Support Technical Information Documents (TIDs) here. These are offered by our wonderful Support teams and hosted under their domain. Nevertheless, we will provide links to those services to ensure you have a smooth journey through the docs.

Unified user interface — improved user experience

While designing the new doc site, we paid great attention to what we learned from our research. Important UI elements are featured prominently and way up above the page’s fold. Search and advanced filters will always be on top of the page. 

When you access the portal — and before you select one of the tabs — you can perform a full-text (Google) search of the entire doc portal site content. After selecting a product, version or document category, you can filter results by topic or product, or by typing a keyword to search titles and descriptions of the documents. Different sorting options offer further flexibility.

With our Linux documentation, we have started to shift away from large monolithic chunks of documentation towards smaller, self-contained units that focus on one distinct purpose and context. This format is easier to consume for readers, search engines and chatbots. To accommodate the latter two, we’ve added a rich layer of metadata to the content articles as well. Edge and Rancher documentation follows a slightly different, but similar, user-centric approach to documentation.

Benefits in a nutshell

But now it’s time to sum up the advantages that are awaiting you. The new documentation portal:

• gets you quickly up to speed via an initial walkthrough and integrated help.
• offers a filterable search across all documentation content, based on Google Search.
• features a clear and easy-to-follow structure and layout. Depending on the document type or series, you can find documents grouped by products, categories or hardware and software partners.
• comes with enhanced document filters. You can filter the document lists now by title, subtitle and description terms, but also by task or topic or by products.
• gives you much faster access to documents thanks to enhanced site performance.

At the end of the day, all these enhancements and new functionalities can help you to:

• cut down your operational costs. You will be able to avoid submitting simple support queries that can now be easily resolved using technical documentation.
• reduce your time to solution. You can find answers to technical questions or issues up to four times faster than before and use the regained resources for other important tasks.
• focus on the information you really need. Short topic-based articles on core technologies provide you quickly with the required knowledge.

The road goes ever on and on 

Bringing the documentation portal to life doesn’t mean its development will stop with the release. Many cool features are yet to come. We hope to gain more insights from your feedback to improve the SUSE documentation experience even further. To give you some examples, future add-ons could include:

• more curated lists
• further unification of UI/UX across all products and solutions
• article subscriptions and notifications
• AI-powered search
• and many more

Get involved

Now it is on you! Check out the SUSE documentation portal and let us know what you think. Just leave a comment on the portal using the Feedback button. Or send your feedback to doc-team@suse.com, or share it with your SUSE contacts — they will know how to find us 😄. We’d love to hear from you! And finally: enjoy!